E.B. White : Notes on Our Times

Oracles move among us unnoticed, their plainspoken auguries hidden in the murmur of daily life, overlooked by all but the most astute of listeners. Over his many decades with The New Yorker, E. B. White became just such a listener as he wrote his incisive essays for the magazine’s Notes and Comment page. The essays in this collection first appeared in The New Yorker between 1937 and 1952, an interval framed by a waning Great Depression on one end and a waxing Cold War on the other. In between were the Holocaust, World War II, the atomic bomb, Walt Disney, the Iron Curtain, Chuck Yeager, television, the United Nations, and, barely noticed, the invention of the transistor and birth of the modern electronic age. Even when compared with events today, it was a period of unprecedented tumult and uncertainty. It was also a period when writers were not afraid to tackle the big issues head-on in print, as experts filled editorial pages and bookstores with their prescriptions for meeting the great challenges of the time. In contrast to these top-down explicators, White worked up from the specific in his understated way, leading the reader to a conclusion so self-evident by essay’s end that he barely needed to mention it. White writes about perennial human truths, but one must read these essays more than once to fully appreciate their timelessness. The first time through, the description of a modern pig nursery in “Remembrance of Things Past” is arresting for its mention of a long-obsolete piglet-comforting Victrola. But read again, the piece presages the issues surrounding humankind’s separation from nature and the safety of livestock antibiotics, issues that remain pressing concerns today. The Greeks revered their oracles because their utterances inevitably invited petitioners to look inside themselves for an answer. This is where White is at his very best, framing his essays in a way that all but compels introspection. . . 2007 Paul Saffo. From the foreword